


The Darkness Has Arms (It Keeps Us Safe)

by Glinda



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Families of Choice, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 15:42:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4841060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Darkness Has Arms (It Keeps Us Safe)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Melsheartsthings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melsheartsthings/gifts).



> Many thanks to Erika for the very thorough beta reading. 
> 
> Also, apologies to melsheartsthings if I made you think you didn't have a gift - I forgot to tag you when I posted it! Sorry!

The first home that Clint ever knew was on the road. The circus was just meant to be a means to an end, somewhere warm and dry to stay while Barney figured out where they were going next… but it became an actual refuge from the rest of the world. If Trickshot hadn’t caught Clint watching him practice and indulged him in his desire to try his hand with a bow and arrow, the circus might have been only a summer’s worth of happy memories and full bellies in their otherwise crappy childhood. 

As it was, Trickshot had taught them both to shoot, then bargained and cajoled with Carson to get them a permanent place with the circus. Barney was a good shot, but he didn’t have Clint’s drive to perfection, the willingness to spend hours and hours of endless practice until he could shoot a target behind his back – riding a horse or swinging upside down from a trapeze if necessary.

The first night they spent in their own caravan –he’d earned it as one of the circus’ star attractions – with its beautiful paintwork and lumpy yet strangely comfortable bunks still lingers in his memory. The roar of the crowd, the laughter and congratulations of his fellow performers, that smell – greasepaint, sawdust, sweat and animals – all coalesces into a feeling of belonging and home. For years, he will sleep more soundly on the move than he ever does in a static home. He’ll never lose his tendency to be more honest while travelling through the dark of his childhood than in the best-lit sanctuaries of home and work. 

Laura’s first home was a caravan too, but hers didn’t have wheels. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was her sanctuary. She never doubted that she was loved. Her clothes might have been old, but they were clean and it never seemed to matter how long her mother’s shift at the diner had been or how far her father had driven his truck that day, they always had time to help her with her homework.

They taught her the value of a dollar, how to grow her own vegetables and raise her own chickens and that an epic consuming romance like her parents had was swell and all, but it wouldn’t pay the rent. Her parents might not have had much to offer her other than their love, but they’d never let their own broken dreams tarnish hers. She carries it with her, through college and graduate school, it steadies her steps and brightens her smile as she stares down the barrel of the camera and reads the weather report. (People at work call her a weather girl and she smiles so sweetly as she reminds them that she’s actually a qualified meteorologist. She’s been called worse.) 

She calls her parents regularly and never complains that they never ask for anything nice for Christmas and birthdays. They need a new boiler after all and the hole in the roof from the last big storm isn’t going to fix itself. She sleeps in her childhood bedroom whenever she visits, but it's not until she has a home of her own that she really understands. They’ll never move from their tumbledown caravan. It’s home and it’s theirs, all of its charms and flaws a product of their hard work and love.

The first time Laura sees The House, she has no expectation of living there. She feels bruised and fragile after recent events. Supposedly, a colleague of Clint’s is debating buying a house, but is still stuck overseas so asked Clint to check it over for them. Laura doesn’t really believe that, but she does really need to get away so she plays along. She appreciates the distraction. (It’s been three months and the fug of grief that settled over her after her dad’s funeral shows no sign of lifting. She keeps thinking that she should be at least starting to heal by now, but she’s not. She really, really isn’t.) 

This road trip is just what they needed, full of laughter and sightseeing and impromptu games of car karaoke. It’s only a small farm really, just a couple of fields and some woods. Not enough to make a living out of it really, but enough to be self-sufficient if you wanted to be – she imagines that that might appeal to someone getting out of Clint’s line of work. Charmingly ramshackle but with lots of scope. 

She turns her professional eye on it, imagining it as a weather map, looking for the patterns that emerge from the chaos to predict the potential futures. She can see a dozen different futures for the different parts of the house – home offices, art studios, children’s playrooms and sun lounges - and she lays them out as they tour round it. Eventually he cuts her off by handing her the keys. Asks her to pick whichever future for the house she wants, fill it with kids or cats as her heart desires, as long as she spends it with him, in this house. Their house. 

They spend hours sitting on deckchairs in the empty house talking through their ideas, figuring what they want and need from each other, their jobs and life in general. Putting together a map of the future they want to build together. She knows she has her answer when a lifetime of filling in the gaps in the plan fills her with excitement rather than fear. 

During the first year of their partnership, Clint and Natasha spend over 75% of their time in each other’s pockets. On flights, in cars, in training, in cells, on missions. They find each other’s strengths and pick at the scabs of each other’s pasts to find their weaknesses. 

Clint suspects he also spends about 75% of his time at home talking to Laura about Natasha, worrying away at the enigma that is his new partner. Clint may hide Laura from his work, but he doesn’t hide his work from her. They can’t afford to risk it being used as a weapon against him. She knows as much as it’s safe for her to know. No more, no less. And therein lies the rub. 

Sometimes he feels that Natasha knows him better than anyone else on earth, bar Laura. But he knows this for a lie, because she doesn’t know about Laura. 

Mostly, the whole process entertains Laura herself, the way her husband—with his own huge steaming issues around his brother—treats one of the world’s deadliest assassins as a favoured kid sister. She’s long accepted that the friends he lives and works alongside, that fill his anecdotes with warm laughter and pride – that haunt his dreams when they’re killed in action – must necessarily remain strangers to her. 

She appreciates more than she can say, the mechanism by which she has been allowed to become essentially non-existent for official SHIELD purposes, to keep her and their rambunctious toddler safe. However much she longs to meet Natasha for herself, she understands why she never will. Yet she agrees with Clint. 

The trust and loyalty that he has worked so hard to build with Natasha is still a fragile thing, easily shattered. She has been a spy for too long to not go looking into Clint’s private life. Right now, she still values her own privacy too much to pry into what Clint actually does when not with her or otherwise working, but that won’t last forever. Neither of them can delude themselves that she won’t find out eventually, she’s too good at her job to be fooled forever. And when she does, well, Laura doesn’t see any way that that won’t end badly for all of them. 

Home is a fantasy that Natasha has never been allowed to believe is true. She has no memory of a life before the base she was trained at, nor does she know if there ever was a life before it – she may well have been born there or brought as a baby. Before never mattered when she was there, and once she escaped, after was her main priority. 

After, the original mission goes to hell and she defects to join SHIELD, she follows Clint home and Coulson jokes that Clint has brought home a particularly murderous puppy home from his European trip. Natasha would resent it more if it hadn’t been perilously close to being the truth.

It will be 18 months before they have a particularly bad mission and Clint bundles her into his car and they drive half way across the continent sharing terrible memories in the dark of the car. When they arrive, pulling up to a house in the trees, she allows herself to think of it as the cosiest safe house she’s ever seen. 

It’s not until a heavily pregnant Laura meets them on the porch with warm hugs and mugs of hot chocolate, that she realises that this isn’t a safe house, but Clint’s actual home. She watches Cooper tumble on still unsteady legs and feels torn between punching Clint in the face for letting a colleague close enough to his family to hurt them and feeling honoured to be trusted with this knowledge. By the end of her first stay she feels a sneaking admiration for Clint, there’s a certainty in her mind that she would maim and kill to keep this child safe. 

Natasha’s first home, has two floors, an attic and a basement. The floors are polished wood and something is always mid-renovation. She doesn’t live there for about 90% of her time, but its still home. Home is where her family are even through the years when she would gladly walk over hot coals to avoid admitting that they meant anything at all to her. 

Natasha’s not sure how Clint and Laura have explained her to their children, other than saying ‘this is your Auntie Nat; don’t jump on her; she’s injured’ to Cooper the first time they met. It’s not until several years have passed and she’s laid up in the spare room with a broken leg that she finds out. 

As a by-product of having friends with small children, she has seen (multiple times) all the Disney and Pixar films that have come out since Lila was born. Her childhood was utterly void of anything resembling children’s films, she plays it off as a product of being (formerly) Russian but the kids consider it to be a terrible tragedy and are taking advantage of her bed-ridden status to inflict their favourites on her. Afterwards, she will disdainfully tell anyone who pushes at the subject that actually, she prefers Studio Ghibli to Disney. 

Clint will joke that she saw _My Neighbour Totoro_ at an impressionable age, which given it came out in Japan when she was four it was a reasonable suggestion, but she knows he means six months into SHIELD and still operating on high alert and a hair-trigger. 

They’re watching _Lilo and Stitch_ when understanding dawns on her; granted, a couple of a scenes are a little close to the bone for her taste so she can be forgiven that it takes her awhile. 

In the morning she hobbles into the kitchen and sits down across from Clint. She lets him make her a cup of tea (she has her own cupboard in their kitchen, its mostly filled with unusual varieties of loose leaf tea) and then pushes the DVD across the table at him and raises an eyebrow. 

“Stitch.” She states and then falls silent waiting for an explanation.

He shrugs. “Child appropriate representations of PTSD aren’t exactly common. Nat, if you find a better example, I’ll use that instead. It made sense to Cooper, so we used it for Lila too. Can stop if it bothers you, they love the movie but they love you more.”

She shakes her head, “it’s fine,” she assures him, but the rest of what she wants to say sticks on her throat. Her thoughts catching over and over on his unspoken ‘we’. They sit in companionable silence for long minutes until finally Clint moves to make a start on his current project. He gets as far as the door before she manages to force the words past the lump in her throat.

“You’re not…your family isn’t broken, or little really either…”

Clint pauses for a long moment in the doorway before he replies, “no, not anymore,” and carries on out of the room. 

It takes her a long time to believe the implied ‘not since you joined it’ and not to insert a threat of ‘don’t you dare break it.’

~

Sitting in the bowels of the Helicarrier, hyperventilating after her close encounter with the Hulk, she feels little and broken herself. 

She listens to Fury’s voice over the radio and doesn’t want to answer, doesn’t want to have to face her best friend turned against himself. Her words to Loki before weren’t a lie because she does owe Clint a debt, just not the one most people presume. Fury gave her a job, a cause worthy of devotion, all the space she needs and resources to make amends. But Clint gave her a family, and a place to call home. She takes a moment to gather her fear up and crush it down until there is nothing left but cold hard rage at Loki. 

“I copy,” she assures Fury, utterly calm and utterly furious.

How dare he. How dare Loki try to take her family from her, from anyone? 

She’d never have thought herself superhero material before now. Saving the world seemed incomprehensible before. But now, well, she’s long known and accepted that she would burn the world to keep her nephew and niece safe, so it barely seems more difficult to save it for them. Some things are worth fighting for.

~

Many people will tell her over the years that she doesn’t deserve a family, that she’s a monster – both because of what she is and what she’s done – that she has no right to claim happiness or love from anyone. She keeps going back though, to a farmhouse in a clearing in the woods, with warm light and endless DIY projects, where she is – for reasons she can’t begin to get her head around – always welcome. 

After SHIELD falls she stands in the field outside the house for a very long time, watching the house – the lights and the movement within. She can’t make herself move, the short expanse of field and garden seems further than all the miles she drove – doubling back on herself, detouring all over the place to make sure she didn’t bring any tails with her - from Washington to get here. It’s Laura that comes out to meet her in the gathering dark. 

“I think my line here is ‘come in before you catch your death,’” she comments, “but honestly, I think after the week you’ve had, catching cold is the least of your worries.”

Natasha allows a slight smile to cross her lips but nothing more. Deep down she can feel a rumble of what might be laughter, but she daren’t let it surface. It feels more than slightly tinged with hysteria and could just as easily be tears. She wonders idly where Clint is right now. Is he inside distracting the kids from the woman in their garden having a silent meltdown, or is there an arrow aimed at her head from somewhere, waiting to see what she does next? Maybe now she's a threat.

“Tasha, no.” Laura derails her train of thought from its tracks. “I know that face. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I know the thoughts that go with that expression never lead good places.”

“When I left the guys I’ve been working with back in Washington, I told them that I burned all my covers. I needed to find a past I could live with. I didn’t mean to come here, I shouldn’t be here… but here I am. So tell me,” she looks up at Laura then. “Who do you think I should be?”

“I miss my friend,” Laura confides, then she nods back towards the house, “Clint sure misses his best friend, and the kids definitely miss their Auntie Nat. You’re home now; we can figure out the rest in the morning.”

It’s been a long and terrible couple of weeks, but there’s still good in the world, even if this is the only place in the world where Natasha actually believes that to be true. For tonight it’s enough. Laura holds out her hand towards her and after a long moment, Natasha takes it. Together they walk towards the house and the rest of their family. Some things are still good.


End file.
